Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 review

Can Vodafone re-invent mobile social networking?

The definitive Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 review
The definitive Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 review

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Grouping your contacts means you can easily slide left and right thanks to the sensitive screen, and see different sets of coloured tiles. For instance, green might only be relevant to work, and perhaps you won't have Facebook accounts linked in, but you will have chat.

And family might be in purple and exclusively Facebook and phone numbers. These contacts, each having their own colour of tile, make it easier to sort through the 3D view when you look at them all at once (under the 'All' tab, unsurprisingly).

And if you don't like the picture someone has on Facebook (or they don't have one) then you can assign them one through the 360 page too, by uploading through the PC, or by taking a picture with the camera or from the album.

Samsung h1

And once you've managed all this, and set up the contacts menu, then the H1 will do something rather clever – it will show you the people you speak to the most at the front of the 3D list.

This is a nice touch that makes it much easier to see who you regularly talk to – we quickly didn't go much further back than three screens after a few days.

Calling on the phone almost becomes an afterthought with the plethora of contact information on offer, although it's perfectly acceptable as a phone (shockingly).

Vodafone 360 samsung h1

The dialler doesn't support smart dialling, so you have to manually look for the contact rather than entering the name via the number keys.

But call quality is pretty good, and coverage is not bad either – we've had better, but it will probably work in all the places your old Vodafone handset would have got a signal.

Picking up and cancelling calls is a little irritating too, with three sliders being presented to you for accepting the call, sending a message or rejecting it out of hand. We like the fact the rejecting and accepting sliders went different ways, but we'd rather have just had dedicated keys instead.

Vodafone 360 samsung h1

As you can see, once set up, 360 isn't the worst service in the world – we just worry that not many customers will actually be bothered to merge all their contacts in order to be able to see someone's status or updated profile picture.

Vodafone will need to keep finding compelling reasons to visit the 360 home page, otherwise customers will have a lot of redundant tiles on their contacts screen.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.